End Snowden’s Prosecution

Edward Snowden has made our democracy stronger. He should be praised, not prosecuted.

Here are some things we’ve learned because of him: The N.S.A. is collecting information about every phone call made on U.S. telephone networks — collecting information, daily, about hundreds of millions of innocent Americans. It is searching Americans’ international communications, retaining some untold number of them for years in databases that can be accessed without judicial oversight. It has subverted global encryption standards. It has even revived J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook, plotting to discredit “radicals” by exposing their penchants for pornography.

Without Snowden, the president wouldn't even have drafted the panel that recommended changing the surveillance programs he revealed.

But for Snowden, we wouldn’t know any of these things, and we wouldn’t be having this extraordinary debate about the proper scope of the government’s surveillance powers. We wouldn’t be reconsidering the decision to entrust our privacy rights to a court that meets in secret, hears only from the government and rarely publishes its decisions. We wouldn’t be asking whether the Congressional intelligence committees have been co-opted by the agencies they were tasked with regulating.

Perhaps most important, without Snowden, we would not have had the court case that led to Judge Leon's scathing ruling, or the appointment of a presidential panel recommending the end of programs he revealed.

“I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy,” President Obama said in June, after the first disclosures — but of course it was Snowden who made this debate possible.

Would it be better if all of this had remained secret? Would it be better if ordinary citizens had remained in the dark about the extent to which the N.S.A.’s awesome surveillance powers have been trained not only on terrorists but on them? Some of our political leaders appear to think so. Intelligence agencies can’t be effective if they can’t be secretive, they say.

But while the disclosures have embarrassed intelligence officials, laid bare their distortions and misrepresentations, and compelled them to defend the N.S.A.’s activities to legislators, judges and the public, it’s doubtful they’ve compromised our security. Terrorists were surely not surprised by the revelation that the N.S.A. was trying to listen to their phone calls.

Snowden has done the country — and the world — an immense public service. That his whistleblowing has led to charges under the Espionage Act is a travesty. We ought to be spending our collective energy not persecuting him but ensuring that the next Snowden does not have to resign himself to imprisonment or exile in order to alert his fellow citizens that an agency meant to protect them has become a threat to them instead.